The International Press Institute (IPI) has condemned the arrest and interrogation of French journalist Ariane Lavrilleux and demanded her immediate release. She was released after 39 hours in custody.

IPI has also called on French law enforcement authorities to ensure full respect for international media freedom standards on source protection.

Lavrilleux, a journalist with French non-profit investigative platform Disclose was taken into custody last Tuesday, September 19, after a dawn raid on her home by officers from France’s domestic intelligence agency, the DGSI, said an IPI statement.

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Her apartment was searched and her computer was confiscated, in the presence of a judge, according to news media reports.

Journalists at Disclose played a key role in a major investigation of French nuclear tests secrecy in the South Pacific in March 2021.

Lavrilleux was taken to the DGSI headquarters in Marseille and questioned for several hours in the presence of her lawyer as part of an investigation into the publication of highly confidential documents in the investigative series, the “Egypt Papers”. She remained in custody overnight and into Wednesday, September 20.

In November 2021, Lavrilleux had co-authored and published the Egypt Papers, about the Sirli operation, an investigative series based on hundreds of leaked documents which revealed how information gathered by French counter-intelligence bodies was abused by the Egyptian military to carry out a campaign of bombings and arbitrary killings of alleged smugglers and innocent civilians.

French state’s potential complicity
At the time, Disclose had issued a statement justifying its decision to publish the confidential information, citing the evidence of the French state’s potential complicity in serious human rights abuses committed by a foreign regime, and the public’s right to know about such matters of public interest.

In July 2022, prosecutors in Paris opened an investigation that was later handed over to the DGSI. They alleged the publication had compromised national defence secrets and revealed information that could lead to the identification of a protected agent.

It is unclear whether any intelligence official was compromised.

“IPI is highly alarmed by the continued detention and interrogation of Ariane Lavrilleux and urges the General Directorate for Internal Security to proceed with extreme caution and full respect for French law and international legal standards regarding journalistic source protection”, IPI executive director Frane Maroevic said.

“Any charges against Lavrilleux must be dropped immediately and all pressure on Disclose and its journalists related to their investigative work must cease.

“The arrest of an investigative journalist is extremely serious, as it has major ramifications for press freedom”, he added.

“Journalists’ right to protect their sources is enshrined in national and international law as it essential for journalists to expose wrongdoing and hold power to account. The public interest defence of revealing the information published in Disclose’s investigative reporting on the Egyptian military is clear.

“IPI and our global network stand behind Lavrilleux and her colleagues at Disclose and will continue to monitor the situation closely.”

First home search since 2007
The arrest of Lavrilleux is believed to be the first time since 2007 that the home of a French journalist had been searched by police.

In a statement released immediately after the arrest, Disclose said: “The aim of this latest episode of unacceptable intimidation of Disclose journalists is clear: to identify our sources that revealed the Sirli military operation in Egypt.

“In November 2021, Disclose revealed an alleged campaign of arbitrary executions orchestrated by the Egyptian dictatorship of President Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, with the complicity of the French state, based on several hundred documents marked ‘defence – confidential”.

IPI’s Maroevic added that the institute had been in contact with staff at Disclose after the arrest and has offered to help provide legal support through the Media Freedom Rapid Response (MFRR), a European consortium which offers legal aid.

He noted that the arrest was the latest in a number of worrying incidents involving the interrogation of journalists from Disclose in relation to their reporting on the Egyptian government, and its sources for those stories.

This statement by IPI is part of the Media Freedom Rapid Response (MFRR), a Europe-wide mechanism which tracks, monitors and responds to violations of press and media freedom in EU Member States, Candidate Countries, and Ukraine. The project is co-funded by the European Commission.

The Greenpeace flagship Rainbow Warrior is sailing throughout Indonesia – including West Papua – as a vehicle for environmental campaigns.

Rainbow Warrior has often sailed to remote areas to directly see the environmental issues in the region and immediately act against its destruction.

Recently in the Philippines, this is the first visit to Indonesia since 2013. The Rainbow Warrior will be sailing in the archipelago from this week until next month.

The visit themed Jelajah Harmoni Nusantara will be the longest tour of the Rainbow Warrior.

Its first destination is Papua to witness the natural beauty of Papuan rainforest. The ship’s crew will also see the underwater life of Raja Ampat.

After leaving Papua, the Rainbow Warrior will head to Bali, sampling a rich culture which holds local wisdom, and its beliefs that the best source of energy comes from nature.

The last destination is Jakarta. As the capital city of Indonesia, Jakarta has many issues including pollution and waste.

‘Eco-friendly’ city goal
The Rainbow Warrior aims to help Jakarta to be a more comfortable and eco-friendly city.

“The main point of this tour is to create harmony in protecting the Indonesian environment,” Greenpeace said in a press release.

The name Rainbow Warrior was based on the prophecy of a native American tribe Cree in saying, “When the earth becomes sick and dying, there will come a day when people from all over the world will rise up as the Rainbow Warrior.”

The Rainbow Warrior is the third-generation version of the campaign ship.

The first generation vessel was destroyed by limpet mines. On 10 July 1985, French secret agents planted two bombs and sank the Rainbow Warrior, killing photojournalist Fernando Pereira.

After the bombing, the original Rainbow Warrior ship was towed to Matauri Bay, in New Zealand’s Cavalli Islands, and was submerged as an “alive reef” attracted marine life and recreational divers.

The second Rainbow Warrior sailed for 22 years until 2011 when she was replaced with the third generation Rainbow Warrior.

Like its predecessor, this ship carries out green and peaceful campaigns for the future of the planet.

• Rainbow Warrior – 30 years on … a multimedia microsite
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EYES OF FIRE: The Last Voyage Of The Rainbow Warrior,
by David Robie [30 Year Memorial edition]. Auckland, Little Island Press. 2015. 196 pages, illustrated. ISBN 978-1-877484-28-5

This is an updated version of the account of the 1985 sinking of the Rainbow Warrior, first published in 1986. No New Zealander old enough to have been around then will be unaware of the incident, but this is a timely reminder for a newer generation of the day when terrorism reached Waitemata Harbour.

Terrorism is supposed to be the last resort of alienated young men from places we know nothing of, but the bomb which blew up the Rainbow Warrior in downtown Auckland was detonated by men and women employed by the Government of France.

If you didn’t know otherwise, you might suppose that some time before the attack France had suffered a traumatic event, because how else might such an odd barbarism be explained? France surely is a modern and agreeable place which merits our sympathy as the target of terrorism, not its perpetrator.

Not really. France is the same place with the same public institutions as it had in 1985, its current President being from the same party — the Socialists for heaven’s sake — as the President back then. Neither, in essence, has its global circumstances changed.

France regarded Greenpeace as ‘terrorists’
Pollution of land and sea and the degradation of habitats are even more of a problem now than they were last century and you don’t find advanced Western democracies openly calling for the globe to get ever dirtier. And when the Rainbow Warrior docked in Auckland in July 1985, it was in the middle of voyages to draw attention to all sorts of environmental issues. Greenpeace had protested nuclear tests, acid rain, whaling, attacks on dolphins and the dumping of toxic waste. It was doing great work.

Not in the eyes of the French State. Their problem was that the Rainbow Warrior was due to sail towards Tahiti and the French islands in the south-east Pacific, where they were testing nukes. If, for the rest of us, it was bad enough that the Russians and Americans were in a perpetual nuclear confrontation which had the potential to wipe us all away, that tension was at least understandable, given the circumstances at the time.

But France had as much reason to want to join the nuclear club as it would have if it started to do so now. That is, zero. It was pure folly.

Being primarily focused on environmental issues, Greenpeace was protesting the very real and obvious threat to marine life. The French of course said that their tests were clean. Which prompted the obvious response that they should, therefore, test their bombs in mainland France. Rainbow Warrior had just arrived from the Marshall Islands, where the US had long polluted (and where areas are still uninhabitable) with nuclear bombs.

By 1985, France had conducted 193 tests in the Pacific and it wasn’t done yet. France (still) pretends to believe that its overseas colonies are no different politically from Paris or Marseilles, so it felt able to treat the New Zealand government, then beginning to respond to Greenpeace’s campaign for a nuclear-free Pacific, as an ally of its activities, which France labelled terrorism.

Staked out on watch
So it was that one winter’s night on Tamaki Drive boat club members, who had been the target of thieves, were staked out on watch when a speedboat landed. Two people got out, dumped the boat’s engine in the water, and were then picked by a car driven by someone in a frogman suit. The yachties noted the car’s plate number.

A later search of the water came up with water bottles made in France. NZ’s petty criminals had enabled the police to arrest France’s state terrorists.

A Frenchwoman who joined the open activities of Greenpeace in Auckland apparently expressed hostility to the idea of independence for New Caledonia and support for France’s bombs, both opinions being the last things you’d expect to hear around Greenpeace. She advanced the rationale that nukes were needed as otherwise “we risk becoming like Finland, which is so influenced by Russia”.

Hearing this ingénue, an experienced observer who knew European history would have intuited that she had been indoctrinated by an older and nostalgic extremist as no-one else had worried about Finnish sovereignty since about 1940. She turned out later to have been a spy.

While it might not be surprising that no local NZ activist would have suspected her, it is surprising that an agent of the French secret police was so gauche.

It seems that the French didn’t know enough of their own history to have created a convincing persona for their agent, who would have been detected had she operated in a more experienced milieu.

Operationally, too, French tactics were clumsy. Twice before they had sunk ships, and both times they achieved nothing beyond discrediting the activities they were hoping to defend.

And just as its secret police have been amateurishly incompetent, so has its political class. David Robie tells us in Eyes of Fire that theories from the political elites in France included the assertion that low-tech Greenpeace was about to advance on French Polynesia with an armada so loaded with the latest gadgets to thwart the tests that the nuke programme would have to be abandoned.

It was said that Greenpeace was financed by BP to maintain its oil interests, that the UK’s MI6, the South African secret police and the Soviet’s KGB had infiltrated Greenpeace. The latter, an old favourite, was picked up a naive NZ media and across the Tasman in the Australian. This detail is significant in that, as a “quality” Tory broadsheet with sophisticated journalists, the paper must have known the claim was suspect. Ideology trumps truth every time.

The rhetoric did not often reach eloquence. One letter to the Greenpeace office after the bombing warned of the traitors ready to deliver the country to the commies. They included “pacifists, hooligans, hippies, trade unions, PLO, Khomeinists, Labour terrorists – all the same riff-raff, all KGB agents.”

No wonder the correspondent concluded with: “Revenge. Better dead than Red. No more Vietnams”. For years serious and educated people had been debating this dilemma of whether they would prefer to be crimson or expired.

Exact opposite of intended result
You’d think that the combined resources of the French elites would have come up with something better than these childish conspiracy theories, but perhaps the greatest of the many asinine calculations of the French State was its assumption that blowing up a Greenie ship in an allied country on the other side of the world would help it to carry on poisoning the South Pacific.

Instead, inevitably, international outrage raised Greenpeace’s profile enormously. It is no coincidence that the peace and environmental movements around the world became increasingly popular from the mid-1980s.

Only one man was killed, a Portuguese-born photographer, Fernando Pereira, but there could easily have been a high death toll. The frogmen who placed the bomb timed it to detonate just before midnight when normally there would have been many others in their cabins, but most happened to be on shore that night.

Robie himself had been on board when the ship docked in Auckland, having sailed from the Marshall Islands.

Even after the event, after the terrorists were caught, President Mitterrand’s France knew no shame, and the dirty tricks continued. Now perhaps there’s some resolution, some (in the irritating vernacular of the day) closure.

In 1987 – after Robie’s original account came out – the Rainbow Warrior was sunk off Matauri Bay in Northland as a likely future marine habitat for divers to explore. And in 1996 France signed the nuclear test ban treaty.

Robie’s professional life has been devoted to the peoples of the Pacific. A journalist and university teacher, he’s written a series of investigative accounts of the struggles of the island nations against big power politics.

Eyes Of Fire is an excellent production, thorough and informed with a restrained passion, with interesting photographs. French politicians, by and large, might now be behaving in a more acceptable fashion, but the global issues that Robie has analysed – of pollution and violence and the stupidity and corruption of power – still demand our witness.

This review of Eyes of Fire was written for CAFCA’s Foreign Control Watchdog 141 magazine April 2016 and has been republished with permission. The publisher Little Island Press’s companion website for the book, Eyes of Fire: 30 Years On, features articles and a photo gallery by the author David Robie; an article by French journalist Pierre Gleizes; author of Rainbow Warrior Mon Amour; and more than 40 video interviews and stories featuring the protagonists by AUT University student journalists.